Jay Harvey Upstage

Mitzi Westra's performances are well-remembered.   Mezzo-soprano Mitzi Westra minded her academic Ps and Qs while also  singing with buoyant freedom and expressive heft in a faculty recital Monday night at the University of Indianapolis. "Romance Languages" was the rubric under which selections of Italian, Portuguese, French, and Italian art songs were artfully placed with spoken introductions emphasizing the diction challenges in each of the four languages. The lecture element was succeeded by her enchanting  interpretations, accompanied insightfully by Elisabeth Hoegberg, piano, in Ruth Lilly Performance Hall, Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center .  I have long been pleased to attend Westra's performances, usually in context with other singers, and significantly in such crowd favorites as Handel's "Messiah." The way she put across such alto arias as "He was despised" and "O Thou, That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion"  alone has provide...

Vivian exults in partnering with Di and Val. Like any other sport, warming up for death may be a fitness regime, or it may look like death warmed over. The tension between approaches to the final chapter facing everyone may invite more than a touch of humor.  Wendy Herlich went full bore into mortality's comic potential in writing "Wasabia," a 2024 one-act that the Phoenix Theatre is opening this weekend in the Basile Theater. The booklet for the new production, directed by Brian Balcom on the Phoenix's Basile Stage, carries a playwright's note that indicates personal reasons for dealing with death unflinchingly, as well as humorously. She has centered the emotional glitch that brings humor into play in several episodes that involve two secondary characters in various guises, representing drugs used in assisted suicide.  Legal protection for the choice is under consideration or approved among an increasing number of states. That trend is the subject of one of the...

  Antje Weithaas is ensemble guest on this tour.  After lighter music of great polish and right to the point of coordinated virtuosity occupied the first half, the visiting Israeli Chamber Project, including a guest violinist from Germany, Antje Weithaas , moved into high seriousness with the advantage of familiarity after intermission.   Ensemble Music Society presented the seven visiting musicians in an arrangement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, op. 55 ("Eroica") at the Indiana History Center Wednesday night. Many in the audience had recently experienced the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's performance of the original work under music director Jun M ä rkl's inspired direction. The appropriately well-designed arrangement by Yuval Shapiro was superbly played by the visitors. Simply the repeat of the exposition in the first movement held additional interest that the full-orchestra account wouldn't necessarily provide.  There were details brought out...

Shannon Lee impressed the IVCI jury in 2018. As compatible as pianists working with IVCI participants have long been, new competition terrain in true duo partnership was explored Tuesday night with the Indianapolis return of Shannon Lee, a laureate in the 2018 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. For five years, the Canadian violinist has been collaborating with Russian-born pianist Arseniy Gusev. That's included two recordings that were reflected in the program they offered at the Indiana History Center. Composers have long emphasized equality between the two instruments in bringing their respective techniques and modes of expression into partnership. Works for violin and piano, many of them sonatas, abound in the repertoire.  It was like catnip to the acknowledged master Elliott Carter, an explorer of oppositions in music who found the instruments' physical differences — "between stroking and striking," as he put it — a delectable challenge in creatin...

Martinez plays Falla masterpiece with the ICO.   Marketing this month's Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra concert had the advantage of a glamorous guest soloist, and the organization even used most of the phrase in the title of the work Gabriela Martinez  played in labeling the performance.  "Gardens of Spain" was the concert's billing, highlighting the pianist's  performance with the orchestra in Manuel de Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain." Still, the ICO didn't sell short the world premiere also on the program: a new work by the prolific composer Stacy Garrop, alluringly titled "Chroma," a six-movement salute to colors that the fine lighting system of the Schrott Center illuminated as the composition unfolded under the astute direction of Matthew Kraemer. I first became acquainted with Garrop's artistry in concert more than a dozen years ago with her folklore-linked "Silver Dagger." Since then, when the Lincoln ...

 "Howdy!" is the one-word greeting Branford Marsalis offered to the large crowd gathered to hear his quartet Friday night at the Payne & Mencias Palladium. He may have dropped the salute as something implicitly Hoosier, but it would be hard to interpret it as looking down his nose at us. Neither effusive nor tight-lipped in his commentary, the veteran saxophonist showed the friendly demeanor that has always contrasted with the lecturing stance of trumpeter Wynton, the other household name among the distinguished New Orleans musical family.  He led one long set at  the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts jazz series, fronting a long- Branford Marsalis Quartet: By the third number, the jackets were off. intact group including Joey Calderazzo, piano; Eric Revis, bass, and Justin Faulkner, drums. Early in the performance came two catchy originals by Calderazzo, "Conversation Among the Ruins" and "The Mighty Sword." In between there was a zesty...